Before submission please check the individual journal homepage for information on the journal’s subject scope, available article types, specific manuscript length limits and details of any variations to the peer review process that might apply.

General

IOP aims to be flexible and to make submission as easy as possible for authors. We only require a PDF file of the new article (and any suitable supplementary data files) on submission. Authors are asked to submit at revision stage the source files used to create their PDF (to assist with accurate typesetting), the text of which can be in either Microsoft Word or TeX/LaTeX. Our online submission form also allows authors to collect and directly upload their article from the arXiv and to upload other compressed or archived files.

Authors can format their papers in the way that they choose. It is not necessary to try to produce pages that look like published journal pages, as the detailed design (typesetting) work will be undertaken by IOP as part of the production process. However we do ask that authors consider the readability for referees when formatting their manuscripts. For example, please use a reasonable font size (at least 10 point) and line spacing. There is no need for authors to include line numbers in their manuscript as these will automatically be added on submission. Figures and tables should be embedded at the appropriate point within the text, rather than placed at the end of the manuscript. Papers must be written in English.

Length of submissions

Most journals have guidelines for the maximum recommended length for each different type of article, as detailed in the scope statement available from that journal’s homepage. It is important that you check these guidelines when preparing your submission. Articles which are longer than the length limit may still be considered for publication provided that the length is clearly justified by the scientific content.

Article structure

Your article should normally consist of the following sections and should follow the Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion system:

a title page with the title of the article, name(s) of author(s) and address(es) of establishment(s) where the work was carried out

an abstract

an introduction

a methods section

a results section

a discussion section

a conclusion section

an acknowledgments section

a list of references

The following sections give a brief overview of the main elements of an article. Please read these first. You can find more detail in our LaTeX and Word guidelines which are presented in the style of a typical article, and offer suggestions on how to format a manuscript.

Title page

Title of article

The title should be concise, informative and meaningful to the whole readership of the journal. Please avoid the use of long systemic names and non-standard abbreviations, acronyms or symbols.

Authors and addresses

Author lists should be finalised prior to submission (for more information on this please consult our Ethical Policy for Journals). For articles with several authors, please list the names of all the authors first, followed by the full postal addresses, using superscript numeric identifiers to link an author with an address where necessary. Authors in all IOP journals have the option to include names in Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters in addition to the English name. The names will be displayed in parentheses after the English name.

If an author’s current address is different from the address where the work was carried out, this should be explained in a footnote. You can also include e-mail addresses on the title page